The considerations on the responsibilities of those who work in the public and of those who work in the field of communication, expressed yesterday by the columns of Corriere della Sera by Piero Bassetti, first President of the Lombardy Region, require everyone to carefully reflect on confusionbeen going on for too long, in the way of working in information. When asked for a comment on the continuous and multiple interventions of experts and the defects of communication in times of Coronavirus, the politician Bassetti, a former entrepreneur and former athlete, now in his nineties, notes that "if the yardstick of communication is that of influencers there will never be a chance. It's true, gossip sells and sells more than news. But a remedy will have to be found...otherwise we will all become imbeciles. I think this: every imbecility delivered as communication equals more imbeciles.
All projects lack of politicians of the caliber of Winston Churchill and Alcide De Gasperi (the President of the Council of Italy for reconstruction who borrowed a good overcoat to go to Paris for the Peace Conference with the representatives of the allied powers) complained by Ernesto Galli Della Loggia in recent days in the Milanese newspaper and mentioned in the interview, Bassetti replies that the statesman of the Christian Democrats “today would struggle to get a headline in the newspapers. It wouldn't be news. Goodbye thought: he does not sell ”. And this is only the last of the references in chronological order to what has now become an emergency also certified by the fact-checking of the main false news on Covid-19 that Agcom, the Communications Guarantee Authority , was forced to publish, with the 10 most widespread hoaxes in Italy, Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States.
This is a confirmation that the outbreak of "imbecility" is unfortunately not limited to our country. A not new phenomenon that had convinced, in September 2018, the then European Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, the Bulgarian MEP Marija Gabriel to establish a "Code of Conduct to Combat Disinformation” which should have been signed by the big players in the sector including Facebook, Google and Mozilla, as well as some associations of platforms and advertising agencies. The Code envisages a series of commitments: the interruption of advertising revenue to accounts and websites that spread disinformation; increasing the transparency of political advertising; the detection of fake accounts; reporting fake news; monitoring online disinformation and protecting privacy.
Given the results, in this modern "Far West", rather than yet another reference to deontological rules or regulations, one should begin to "quarantine the era of irresponsibility” borrowing the title of the leading article of 5 March by the director of “Il Foglio”, starting with those with government responsibilities up to those who work in the variegated world of communication, from journalists to photographers; from the radio-television speaker to the blogger. And perhaps we should make our own the proposal that Claudio Cerasa's fund concluded: “And if we stop spewing bullshit?”, from the title of the book written by Daniel Cohn Bendit.
°°° The author is a former Rai journalist, who was responsible for the Communication of Rai1 and Rai2, was part of the staff of the Director General of Rai, Raffaele Minicucci and from 1992 to 2015 coordinated the Communication of the Italian Song Festival of San Remo.
Excellent calm and reasoned observation, let's hope you find consensus in the upper floors